Initial effects of program elimination on school enrollment and child health outcomes

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PROJECT SUMMARY We study the effects of the recent and sudden rollback of the Mexican conditional cash transfer Prospera on school enrollment and child health outcomes. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs link monetary transfers to poor households to children’s education and health and were first pioneered in Mexico and Brazil two decades ago, now operating in more than 60 mostly developing countries (ibarraran et al. 2017). Prospera’s (previously named Progresa/Oportunidades) initial randomized evaluation and follow up studies demonstrated significant and important improvements on children’s education and health outcomes, as well as in household economic outcomes, summarized in (Parker and Todd, 2017). These studies contributed to both a scale up within Mexico and the spread of its key features to new programs around the world. The sudden rollback of Prospera in early 2019 by President Lopez Obrador provides a unique natural experiment to study whether the positive effects on children of this pioneering and emulated around the world program will be sustained after this sudden change in their households’ economic situations. This project will provide evidence on the initial effects of the program elimination on school enrollment and child health outcomes including infant mortality, consultations, and hospitalizations. Aim 1 studies the impact of the rollback on school enrollment of children and youth between the ages of 6 and 18 in the year following rollback. Aim 2 estimates the impacts of the rollback on infant mortality and on health consultations and hospitalizations in the year following rollback. The study will provide evidence on the initial effects of eliminating an income transfer program to the population in extreme poverty in a developing country. It will provide some of the first evidence on the sustainability of child education and health gains when a conditional cash transfer program ends, and contribute to the new and critical literature on whether program impacts persist after income transfers ends.